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Google Gmail

Google. A web based mail service. Financed by contextual ads. Free of charge. One gigabyte of mail storage. Keyworded categorisation. Built in exportation mechanism to other services, would you want to change over. Sadly no Safari support.

Brought public March 31, press release April 1, speculated about as an April fools joke - It's not. Sure the press release is in the spirit of the day, but the actual service is real. It's being beta tested for the moment. And it's a darn better deal than Hotmail, Yahoo! mail or any other free email service around.

i'm getting one. i don't really need a 1gig, but i get some much spam in my hotmail account, its outstanding. shame it's going to have to be web based. would have liked to aces it through moz mail or thunderbird

Software will read the entire content of each message in order to display ads in the reader's window specifically targeted to what is being discussed in the email (send an email to your brother about acid indigestion and they'll end up an ad for acid indigestion medicine). Sure, it is being read by a machine, not a human....but it still has some privacy advocacy issues here and there.

Also, the gmail privacy policy says that your emails will/may be retained on the system, even after your account is closed. But the real problem is the privacy policy, which does a poor job of saying what it is exactly that will be done with that information. (though now they've added a line saying that your information will not be sold, shared or rented...but does not define if that information is your personal information only, or if it also includes your email transactions) If google dedides to share information or gets bought or merges, or (as has been hinted at) links web searches to email messages...that is a lot of personally identifiable indexed information that be used to correlate quite a bit of searches, correspondence and other privately identifiable information. Especially when you consider that google stores all information you search on, including your IP, date/time, search and a cookie Identifier in conjunction with their DB. Google doesn't consider an IP address personal identity information, since they contend some IPs can be dynamic...which is true to an extent (certainly not as true as it used to be). Although it can easily be argued that what one searches for is private. And once you've got an email address into google, either with Gmail or one of your real email accounts....that's a direct connection between a lot of what you have done online with relation to google.

I'm excited about this!! I hate having a hotmail account, but I'm accustomed to the convenience when I'm traveling, and I don't want to have to pay for a .mac address when I already have a site. Google gets me away from MS, I already supplied my email that I'm interested to them. Awesome

Just as an aside, Google calculates on being able to accomodate about 100 million users, with about one million signing up this year (according to various sources on the net that may or may not know what they are talking about). That means that they calculate coldly on being able to get about 100 petabytes (about the double their current storage capacity) to handle just mail.

Also, I wouldn't say that is an impossible feat. Don't forget that we're talking about a company that has three copies of the web in RAM, and several copies in multiple places on magnetic media.

Andrew: It'll not be a single dedicated server building. It'll be THE Google computer, a distributed computing system consisting of currently about 100 000 servers in datacenters of 10 000 to 15 000 servers each, across the globe. The same system that powers the search engine.

I'd also guess that most users will never approach 1GB of email stored on the Google server, in fact it would be because they've measured how much email the average user keeps around (long term) that they've got a good idea how much actual storage will be needed that they went ahead and decided that 1GB would make an upper limit which sounds magnificent for advertising but is probably only going to be used up by very few individuals.

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i doubt it's a big problem that google reads your mail, out of 100,000,000, who cares really? i haven't got anything illegal(or woth prosecuting for ) going on in my email. and honestly, you think your mail is safer on hotmail? that i doubt, coming from people who think that "the web is expanding, and frankly, i'd prefer it be us who are in charge". where on earth do google get their money from? that really bugs me, they have ads and their contract with yahoo, but can that cover costs of running such a huge system?

Google's AdSense and AdWords products are the most profitable web ad services on the net, they reap rather large profits from them. They also gain profits from custom search servers and search services provided for corporate intranets, they provide results for other search services, they provide wireless search service.

I think gMail spells big trouble for Yahoo Mail. I currently only use Yahoo Mail, but most definitely will switch when gMail comes out. A lot of people probably will do the same, and considering how Yahoo relies on its Mail service for a lot of traffic and revenue- not good for Yahoo.

Yeah. But now that Inktomi and Overture are prime, Yahoo! will be able to sustain themselves on their searcfh services in a much higher degree than the former situation, where they relied on Google. However, if Google gets something to compete with Yahoo! Groups they might put Yahoo! in a really strained position.

Good point about Yahoo Groups vs. Google. Though google mail accounts are certainly a big step in the direction of that kind of competition, it just depends on how much google is willing to diversify and shift out-of-focus their brand while retaining that focus.